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There is a charming scene in Danny DeVito’s 1996 adaptation of Roald Dahl’s Matilda when the titular young hero fully discovers she has telekinetic powers for the first time. She starts using her mind to move various things in her living room and as her control and confidence grow it ends with her dancing on the coffee table as the lamps, plants, toys and an emptied pack of playing cards swing and circle around her, all to the jolly sound of Little Bitty Pretty One by Thurston Harris. It’s all quite delightful.

There is a parallel moment in this movie when this Matilda finds her own psychic abilities. This time it isn’t quaint household objects that are spinning around her though, it is dust and sticks and mud, and there is no expression of happiness on her face but one of hatred and suppressed fury.

This illustrates the difference between these two films perfectly; one is considerably darker and less cartoony than the other. This new movie is not a horror flick, it hasn’t taken a kid’s book and turned it into something nasty like that ghastly looking new Winnie the Pooh slasher film that has its trailer currently doing the rounds on the internet, it is still a lovely family story of bravery and childhood wonder. It does have a slightly more grown up edge to it though and this alternative approach is key to its strength and success.

What these slightly contrasting approaches mean is that this film takes nothing away from its much loved predecessor and there need not be any discussion about which is better or worse. They come from the same source material but they are not really comparable. Crucially this film doesn’t steal much from the experience of seeing the live show it is taken from either. There are songs that exist in one and not the other, going both ways, and the staging and even some of the characterisations are nicely suited to the particular mediums in which they are presented, on both sides. It isn’t like the filmed version of Hamilton that makes a trip to the theatre a little redundant and it’s not like the Chicago or Cats movies that never manage to escape the limitations of the proscenium arch. The first number in this movie is a bit stagey but I feel they might be doing this on purpose because pretty quickly it moves away from this, giving us locations and flights of fantasy that feel very cinematic. Even the scenes that keep returning to the same library location on stage find a simple but effective way to open everything up beautifully on screen.

That bleaker edge I spoke is of course not new. This is from a Roald Dahl book after all. It is interesting because compared to some of his other work the Matilda novel might not seem as grim. It doesn’t have carnivorous giants or witches and there are no grotesquely enlarged insects or tragically shrunken people. I’ve never found it to be a softer story though. It might just be that after centuries of fairy tales about evil relations and unwanted children being locked in attics that the blackness of the set up is diluted but make no mistake that this is a story about child abuse and murder.

The musical already leant into this aspect and through the intimacy of film, this version perhaps does so even more. It never eclipses the dance numbers but that rage we see manifested in the middle of that mind controlled earth storm I referred to earlier in is a big part of the preternatural young protagonist’s performance in this adaptation. Twelve year old Alisha Weir is superb in the role and despite some other strong appearances she, for me, is the star of the film. It is her more than anyone that carries what is an ultimately a fun but still very moving movie.

The casting is inevitably another area in which comparisons with the 90s film are tempting. Matilda’s parents in the form of Danny DeVito and Rhea Perlman were very American and Stephen Graham and Andrea Riseborough are in turn very English so these showings, both strong, stand apart. If Embeth Davidtz’s class teacher Miss Honey was possibility a little too meek back then, this is addressed now by giving No Time to Die’s Lashana Lynch the part. Lynch is downtrodden but not weak and seeing someone who is clearly not slight and cowering still crumble in the face of the Trunchbull only serves to highlight the full scariness of that character and how great the final victory against her is. The Harry Potter series’ Pam Ferris took the role of said headteacher before and now she comes in the shape of the Harry Potter series’ Emma Thompson. Having said that, with the prosthetics and the body suit this is not quite the shape of Emma Thompson but beneath the make up she is tremendous. She has the absolute right mix of comedy villainy and proper menace. She is less of a monster than Ferris was and with a strong feeling of frightening unpredictability she is both exaggerated and totally, terrifyingly believable.

With all of this going on there is a risk that Tim Minchin’s glorious songs might get slightly lost in the mix and I’m not sure how they may resonate if unlike me you’ve not enthusiastically sung along to them on every family car journey for the last eleven years. The two stand outs When I Grow Up and Naughty are both given lovely stagings though, with a real celebration of the power, hopes and imagination of children. The joyous final showstopper Revolting Children lands well too, and will have you taking out your own hockey stick and using it as a sword. If it is your first time to these melodies then I recommend you revisit them on whatever music service you use to properly appreciate the beautiful sentiment and sharp wit of Minchin’s lyrics.

As you’ll have picked up I was already a fan of this musical and in terms of how I feel about the book you’ll get some sense of my feelings in this respect when I tell you that one of my daughters is actually called Matilda. Approaching the movie with this background I have to say that it is a triumph and the story has made the transition to my favourite medium wonderfully (again).

If I had one criticism, the precision of the storytelling might not be there. It just doesn’t have the same time to breathe in a two hour movie as it does on the page or the stage. DeVito’s movie didn’t suffer this as much but then he didn’t have ten musical numbers to get in. Still though, this is a total joy. It has the perfect balance of fantasy and reality, caricature and truth and is underpinned by great performances and delightful direction from Matthew Warchus, finally bringing his film career and extensive West End experience together. In the end this movie is absolutely what Matilda has to be in whatever form it comes, a small but powerful inspiration.

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The Ripley Factor:

The whole reason I have this bit at the end of my reviews is because women are still too often marginalised or misrepresented in cinema. Matilda Wormwood is and always has been a proper little hero but hers is not a feminist battle. She does have issues with her parents and the fight is mostly with her father in this version, who does demean her gender, but more important to the story is her status as a child.

In terms of how children are depicted on screen, it tends to be all or nothing. Often they don’t feature at all but no one is going to decry the absence of under tens in Top Gun Maverick or The Banshees of Inishiren; I certainly don’t need to add a new section looking at school kids in cinema called the Weasley Factor. When they are a part of the narrative though they are generally a big part.

In these cases though, Harry Potter and The Goonies notwithstanding, they are commonly not surrounded by other children. There might a sibling or two but generally they are alone like Anakin Skywalker, Dorothy, Mowgli, Spirit Away’s Chihiro or Kevin McCallister.

What this film does by contrast, more than the book even, is show how kids can come together to take on the bullies of this world and that is the message to celebrate here